To get a job we need to have a certain level of academic qualification along with other things like experience in specific types of work, physical fitness, nationality, etc. The requirement of academic qualification or formal education generally has two components: the certificate or degree and the discipline. For example, a job advertisement may specify the requirement of graduation in chemistry or post graduate degree in commerce, and so on. Some jobs may require vocational education which provides specific skills and knowledge for particular occupations like plumbing, carpentry, auto repair, electrical work, etc. Some basic levels of academic qualification like school education up to 8th grade or SSC level, etc. are commonly set as prerequisites for vocational education.
Suppose you don’t need to do a job; you have inherited enormous wealth from your parents or other relatives. Is it still necessary for you to get academic education? Of course, you need to know how to read and write so that you can understand the letters or notices from different quarters like utility companies and various government agencies and communicate with them as necessary. You also need to know some mathematics to keep account of your wealth, earnings, and expenditures. You can learn that much at home without going to school. Should you still pursue further education? The answer depends on your personal valuation of education and also how the people around you, that is, your society value education. If education is highly valued in your society, you will feel social pressure to get more education.
Sometimes we come across stories like somebody has become a millionaire or billionaire but doesn’t have any academic education or has very little education. Such stories often have a connotation that academic education is useless. Some popular names that come up in this context include Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. They are successful entrepreneurs with fame and fortune. Both of them dropped out of their undergraduate studies to pursue interests in their respective fields. Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard University to pursue his passion for computer programming and Mark Zuckerberg also dropped out of Harvard University to focus on building a social media platform. There are two things to note here: One, these people are exceptional and exceptions can’t be used to establish causality relations between education and success in life. Two, they did not complete their undergraduate studies but they reached up to that level and look at the university that they attended – Harvard, one of the top universities in the USA as well as in the whole world. So, these examples do not actually demean the value of education.
Of course, there are examples of people with truly very little education who attained huge business success and accumulated great wealth. Again, these constitute a very small group of exceptional cases among more than eight billion people on Earth.
Moreover, success in life has different definitions for different people. And, it can always be argued that becoming a millionaire or billionaire doesn’t mean the attainment of success in life. Success in earning huge amounts of money or acquiring great wealth is not the criterion for evaluating the effectiveness of academic education.
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This article was published in the Daily Sun on July 13, 2023. Please read the full article here or here.